Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Hello App Engine Developers!
My name is Peter Lubbers and I work for Kaazing, where we have developed an enterprise-ready WebSocket gateway, named — you guessed it — Kaazing WebSocket Gateway, which enables highly scalable, full-duplex real-time Web communication based on the new HTML5 Web Sockets standard. Using Kaazing's technology, you can seamlessly and reliably extend any TCP-based business messaging protocol to the Web with ultra high performance and minimal latency. The Kaazing WebSocket Gateway also provides emulation for browsers that do not support HTML5 Web Sockets, so you can start coding against the standard today.

We recently built an automated software license key generator using Google App Engine. This internal application proved to be very easy to build and we were able to deploy it within a day. We were extremely impressed with how simple it was to create a service that links our existing Google Apps accounts. Here's a bit of background on our solution and why we chose to implement it with App Engine.

The Problem
We recently needed to automatically create custom license key files for our customers. In order to scale up to our large customer base, we needed a simple internal solution that provided an automated way to quickly generate custom license key files on demand. The key to this hosted licensing system was that it had to tie into our existing Google Apps infrastructure. Fortunately, Google Apps integration (documented here) was very easy to achieve.

Why Google App Engine?
We chose App Engine because it allowed us to create a solution quickly. Since we are already a Google Apps shop, as well as a Java shop, we found the Google Apps integration provided by App Engine to be very helpful, and because App Engine provides an extremely easy development model — from design, to prototype, to a deployed implementation — we found that it exactly suited our needs.

How we built our implementation
Our implementation was extremely simple; we basically capitalized on App Engine's out-of-the-box integration with Google Apps so it was just a matter of writing an automatic license key generator and using App Engine's built-in e-mail service. This license key generator application was then made available as an application on our Google Apps instance.

The best part? From start to finish our license key generator application took no more than a day to prototype, test, and deploy.

Future Apps on App Engine
Overall we were extremely pleased with how easy it was to use App Engine to build a custom solution on top of our existing Google Apps framework. We also appreciate App Engine's support for Java, so we look forward to building other App Engine apps in the future.

To learn more about Kaazing software including their WebSocket Gateway, which includes a developer license (with a license key generated with the App Engine powered license key generator application) visit: http://www.kaazing.com/.